Accused murderer Kevin Le took the witness stand yesterday and said his girlfriend, 20-year-old Liana Mai Le, was killed last Jan. 15 by two masked intruders at their apartment in the Hatfield Village complex.

Le, a 28-year-old Vietnamese immigrant, is accused of stabbing and strangling his live-in girlfriend and then slashing himself because he feared Liana Mai Le would return to her estranged husband.

Police found them unconscious and lying in blood. According to trial testimony, Le became conscious on the way to the hospital and admitted commiting the crime.

Le said yesterday that his girlfriend was killed by two stocking-faced intruders. He also said he was forced to stab himself nearly to death with a kitchen knife at gunpoint.

Speaking softly, the diminutive Le -- who stands 5 feet and weighs 98 pounds -- said he noticed the men inside the apartment just after returning from an Asian food market.

Le said he didn't know the assailants but they apparently knew him. They told him: "You stole somebody's wife. You ruined somebody's family."

"I could not fight with them," he said. "Both of them were bigger than me with a gun.

"If I try some stupid move ... boom-boom-boom," he said.

Le said he told one of the attackers, "Please kill me if you want to kill someone."

"He hit me in the head," Le said. "I don't know anything after that. The next thing I know I was in the hospital."

Throughout yesterday's testimony at the Montgomery County Courthouse, Steinberg had to ask the soft-spoken defendant to speak up, shout if he had to, so the jury could hear.

Le said he left Vietnam 12 years ago at 16, put down roots in Phoenix, Ariz., -- where he was taken in by foster parents and graduated from high school -- and then moved to the Souderton area, where he got a job at a Telford bag-making plant.

There he met Liana Mai Le, who was unhappy in an arranged marriage, and fell in love. They ended up having a child and living together at the Hatfield Village Apartments.

But by late 1994, according to Miller, Liana Mai Le and her husband were thinking about reconciling and even took a trip to Atlantic City to discuss it.